Cybersecurity agency Hacken has blamed a personal key leak that allowed a foul actor to mint and loot $250,000 value of the ecosystem’s native Hacken Token (HAI), inflicting it to plummet round 99% on Saturday.

In an X publish, Hacken said the personal key was linked to an account with a minting function on the Ethereum and BNB Chain, which led to the “unauthorized HAI minting and a dump” on decentralized exchanges — causing a 99% drop within the worth of HAI from $0.015 to $0.000056.

HAI is presently buying and selling at $0.00026.

Hacken crew members stated they’ve since revoked the compromised minter account from the token contract and regained management; nonetheless, based mostly on Hacken’s present estimates, the dangerous actor nonetheless managed to flee with a minimum of $250,000 value of tokens.

“The core infrastructure has at all times been separate from HAI infra and stays safe. There’s presently no proof of any compromise past the personal keys,” Hacken stated. 

Non-public key leak linked to bridge deployment 

Hacken stated the personal key was compromised throughout “architectural modifications” to the agency’s blockchain bridge, which had been being utilized “particularly to forestall dangers like this,” in response to Hacken. 

“Hacken’s bridge was constructed at a time when the market and tech appeared very completely different. Redesigning a deployed bridge means migrating contracts — a fancy authorized and technical course of,” the agency stated. 

As a precaution, Hacken has paused bridge transactions on Ethereum and BNB Chain till additional discover and warned that there were no airdrops planned and that any posts saying in any other case are scams. 

Tokens purchased after hack not supported 

Hacken CEO Dyma Budorin said in an X publish on Sunday that every one tokens on the affected networks, BNB Good Chain and Ethereum, purchased after the hack “is not going to be supported within the new tokenomics.” 

“Our aim was at all times to transform HAI right into a safety token that represents Hacken fairness and has crypto flexibility. Now could be the time to speed up the concept implementation,” he stated. 

Hacken stated its long-term aim now could be to rework HAI right into a regulated monetary software that merges token utility with fairness rights by merging HAI and Hacken’s fairness shareholders. 

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All official consumer balances stay trackable, and HAI tokens may have the choice to swap later, with particulars coming quickly, in response to Hacken. 

Hackers stole $1.6 billion in first quarter this yr

Blockchain safety agency PeckShield said in an April report that hackers stole over $1.63 billion in crypto throughout the first quarter of 2025. 

Extra lately, liquid staking protocol Meta pool suffered a similar exploit on June 18, when an attacker was in a position to mint 9,705 of the liquid staking protocol’s token mpETH value practically $27 million however solely managed to steal round 52.5 Ether (ETH), value simply over $132,000.

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